Bee Informed provides hub of online info for bee workers

Researchers are still befuddled as to what exactly is causing bees to die.

With a lack of something better to call it, researchers have named the mysterious death of bees Colony Collapse Disorder; the bees leave the hive and don't come back.

The rate of loss in managed hives was about 30 percent from 2006-11, the USDA Agricultural Research Service reports. Last year, the amount of loss was slightly less.

The root cause may never be known. But in the meantime, a national effort is under way to track whether some beekeepers have better luck with different management techniques.

The program is the Bee Informed Partnership, funded for five years with $5 million in federal funding.

Now in its second year, researchers are involved through nine universities across the nation. Research is shared with all the universities involved.

For the University of California, the hub is in Butte County through the Cooperative Extension Office in Oroville.

What works in one region won't necessarily work in another. Yet, beekeepers working with the program can swap experiences and try what has worked for others.

Among the efforts is to survey beekeepers and ask them what management practices they use, then compare how many of their bees survive.

For example, last year a survey asked beekeepers what steps they took to prepare their bees for winter, to see if there are methods that work better than others.

Did beekeepers insulate the bee boxes? Wrap them with tar paper? Move colonies to a southern location? Move them inside?

Cooperative Extension Farm Adviser Joe Connell works on the project with Susan Donohue, from his office in Oroville. He said it's important to have this area included in the research because Northern California is an important hub for queen bee production.

Providing new queens is important because as hives collapse, beekeepers need to build new colonies. Local breeders ship queens across the country.

Bee breeders already do a lot of work to create better bee genetics, he said. Universities are working on this as well, and are able to share the information through the network built through the Bee Informed network.

The website http://beeinformed.org includes blog discussions, survey results and places to share back and forth.

Bees are necessary to pollinate about a third of food crops, including almonds. With the colony collapse and other factors, beekeepers have had to work harder to deliver hives that will do the job.

So far, beekeepers have been able to keep up with demand, but during some years, the numbers in hives have been low. Bee rental prices have also increased over the past decade.

Almonds have historically been one of the area's top crops. In 2011, Butte County growers produced $129 million in almonds.